The Twilight Children #4

The mysteries of Ela and the elusive orbs converge to create a bigger conundrum in the conclusion of THE TWILIGHT CHILDREN. The young scientist Felix, the towns sheriff, the local doctor and the rest of the cast involved in this adventure come to understand the seriousness of the danger threatening the town, and possibly the entire planet, if someone doesnt do something fast. Ela is the only hope, and she perhaps must sacrifice what shes come to love the most.

And that seems to have been a conscious effort on the part of both Cooke and Hernandez. Both of them have commented about the structuring of this book hinging on ambiguity. This kind of nuanced, open-ended storytelling is perfect for a mini-series format. While "The Twilight Children" might infuriate readers who prefer more straight-up storylines, it'd be difficult to argue that it doesn't manage to achieve a hell of a lot in its few short issues. Hernandez and Cooke have constructed a book that istight enough to tell a story in four issues, and open-ended enough that it can be read over and over again for completely differentexperiences. Read Full Review

Gilbert Hernandez and Darwyn Cooke brought their various plot threads and relationship dramas to such satisfying climaxes with last issue, that this final issue can't help but feel a little slight in comparison. Read Full Review

You ever bite into some really good food, and you'relike, "Wow! This is really good food! This is the best food I have evertasted!" And then you take another bite and you're like, "This is great food.Absolutely stellar. This food should be the benchmark for all other food andfoodstuffs." Then on the third bite, you're like, "Hmm"this is good food. Itmight be a little too spicy, though. For me. If you like spicy food then youwill definitely love it." And then on the fourth bite, your food turns into apelican that bites you on the nose and then tells your co-workers that you LARPon weekends and then gets on a long elevator ride with you and lays thethickest, smelliest fart? That's what this series is like. Sigh. Read Full Review

This book was a strange and interesting trip to take for four issues, giving readers who are new to Gabriel Hernandez’ work (people like myself) an opportunity to dip a toe slightly into the deep waters of the creator of Love and Rockets, along with giving us some gorgeous artwork (as is the expectation) from Darwyn Cooke. The first issue of this series floored me, and made me certain I would not miss an issue. The first issue reminded me why Vertigo does what it does so well, and showed me that they were far from over making independent stories come to life in ways that DC doesn’t often foray into.
But this issue just wasn’t up to par for the rest of the series. Not that this issue was some abhorrent monster, or some sort of slapped together “thing” that only barely resembles an ending- on the contrary, this book continues to look gorgeous and to be a well drawn piece of work, but the story seemingly was thrown aganst the wall to see what sticks for this last issue; and what stuck to the wall in the last issue of Twilight Children? Not much.
The ending was inscrutable, without a clear answer in sight. And the scene meant to be the prologue to the story answers little to nothing about what transpired over the four issues. I don’t know if this book suffered under the same delusions that Lost did, that creators proposed a great pitch for an opening story, but never thought to formulate an ending, so when the time came to wrap things up, everything had been squandered in the efforts to craft the idea behind the story that the actual conclusion was something beyond their grasp.
But still, this book is gorgeous, and maybe with some retooling, and possibly a new ending, the collected edition of this story could read better and with a bit more cohesion. Hopefully there will either be more story told for this, or a new and “proper” ending given to us, because I really felt more than a bit let down by the way things ended. I still feel like there should ha